I just read this in a blog: "As long as people look to a top down structure for harmony, at least in the ways we now imagine, I don't believe peace will result."
From a very early age, I've always balked at authority. Contrary to my mother's litany of my being "rebellious" (in other words, a moral failing on my part), it's actually a part of my temperament type (all of us MasterMinds scorn titles, degrees, etc. as some sort of Holy Order; we only render earned respect). When I became a teen, it kept me from following the herd; as an adult, it kept me from making idiotic choices that I'd regret for the rest of my life.
But I've long been studying this question of hierarchy: like it or not, pecking order seems to be built into the fabric of the universe, viz. even amongst the animals, it exists. Barring some sort of total "reformatting" of man's nature, there will perforce have to be some sort of structure, which of course implies hierarchy. Just take a simple example: on a ship, if there's a catastrophe, somebody has to be in control, and since the situation is multifaceted, there have to be varieties of "rank." Life is like a ship that way.
As a footnote, I also don't believe all men are equal: you may be good at physics and math, while I'm a total dope in that area. I may be ambitious and industrious, whereas you may be a slacker. The only "equality" I see in man is biological (human DNA) and moral (all of us are capable of evil in varying degrees). I do believe it's a chimera to pump billions of dollars into a certain group when that group as a whole is historically incapable of functioning on the level of a group that produced, say, Western Civilization.
